Posts

All the articles I've posted.

• WordPress isn't dying — it's decaying. And developers and small businesses feel it first.

  30 Jun, 2026

  It still runs ~42% of the web, so 'dying' is clickbait. But its share is falling faster every month, 96% of its security holes live in its plugins, and its own governance is in court. The honest state of WordPress in 2026 — through the site I just tore out and rebuilt: my wife's.

• NamLoop, Part II: git push, and it's live — how embarrassingly easy deploying became

  27 Jun, 2026

  The weekend YouTube looper needed a home on the internet. It got one — global CDN, HTTPS, custom domain, CI/CD on every push — for $0, in less time than choosing its name. What deploying a backend-less web project looks like in 2026.

• Rebuilding my wife's website, Part IV: the site was live — then she sent me a WhatsApp message

  24 Jun, 2026

  Three things shipping taught us that QA couldn't: a link preview that undersold her in every group chat, a layout bug at the viewport nobody tests, and finally cornering the phantom Lighthouse LCP. All fixed on the live krystle.hk.

• Rebuilding my wife's website, Part III: the SEO story — and a name Google couldn't find

  21 Jun, 2026

  No meta descriptions, no structured data, junk pages indexed — and her own Chinese name appearing nowhere on the site. How the rebuild of krystle.hk took Lighthouse SEO from 85 to 100 on every page.

• Rebuilding my wife's website, Part II: the UI — same design, an interface that finally works

  18 Jun, 2026

  The rebuild of krystle.hk kept the design pixel-close and replaced every plugin-powered interaction: a hero without a 700 KB slider, a portfolio that can't hide her events, a native-dialog lightbox — and a font bug that mangled her own name.

• Rebuilding my wife's website, Part I: WordPress → static HTML — and the honest pros and cons

  15 Jun, 2026

  Her WordPress portfolio scored 56 on Lighthouse and took 13.8 seconds to paint. One weekend with an AI agent later: 102 pages of hand-rolled static HTML, first paint 1.7s, 5 KB of JavaScript. How we did it — and when you shouldn't.

• Vibe-coding NamLoop: an ad-free YouTube looper, shipped in a weekend

  12 Jun, 2026

  A weekend, some spare tokens, and an itch — I vibe-coded NamLoop: loop any YouTube video, the whole thing or a precise A–B segment, ad-free. What it does, how the looping actually works, and what 'vibe coding' really changes.

• Cutting our cloud bill 90% with Claude and gcloud — safely

  9 Jun, 2026

  An agentic workflow with Claude and the gcloud CLI took our monthly cloud spend from $2,800 to $300 — no code changes, no downtime. The method, and the safety rails that actually matter.